Politics and the Prop 8 Decision

A few years ago, national Democrats would have woken up dreading this day. Just as the Presidential campaign really gets going, judges from the 9th Circuit—the circuit conservatives love to hate—overturn the will of the voters of California and declare a ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional? They might as well have wrapped their opinion in a bow and sent it to Karl Rove as an early Christmas present.

But that was then. And this is now, a time when even a major decision like the one that a three-judge panel handed down Tuesday is unlikely to have a major impact on the election. If anything, the political effect of this decision may be limited to showing that the days when same-sex marriage made an effective wedge issue for Republicans are over.

No matter what, it would be difficult for the G.O.P. to turn this decision into an advantage at the polls this year—with the economy still troubled, social issues just don’t have the kind of impact they might in other years.

It’s not just about the economy, though. Over the past five or six years, Americans have grown much more accepting of same-sex marriage: depending on the polls you’re looking at, support for the idea is up by ten percentage points, or sometimes more. (A Gallup poll in May of last year even found a majority, fifty-three per cent, in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage.)

That’s not to say, though, that same-sex marriage would now be an automatic winner at the ballot box. Issues like this one often come down to motivation, and on that score things are still probably on the Republicans’ side. Straight people who have come around to the idea of letting their gay friends and relatives marry aren’t likely to determine their vote based solely on the issue; social conservatives are a different story.

The biggest obstacle to using marriage as a wedge issue is simply a procedural one: you can only ban gay weddings so many times. And under Rove, the Republicans hit that limit in many states, which now have either constitutional amendments like the one overturned Tuesday, or statutes that were put to the voters, or both. In all, forty-one states either have a constitutional prohibition on same-sex marriage, or a statutory one. There are a couple potential battleground states where the G.O.P. could still try to make this an issue—North Carolina and Minnesota, for example—but, even there, they’re not likely to meet with much success.

Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty.

Alex Koppelman was a politics editor for newyorker.com from from 2011 to 2013.